Research aim & questions

Identifying design opportunities for an online platform that mobilizes caregivers’ individual and collective potential for caring for a person on the autism spectrum.

Process In A Nutshell

  • UX Research

    To understand how caregivers, namely parents of children on the autism spectrum, seek and share support online and offline, I conducted semi-structured interviews with more than 20 caregivers, did a digital ethnography on a Facebook caregivers group, and did a countrywide online survey with 130 respondents. These studies are published in Human-Computer Interaction conferences.

  • Co-Design

    Did collaborative design workshops with caregivers and various stakeholders related to autism care such as doctors, special education teachers, and academicians. These activities resulted in numerous service ideas and service improvement roadmaps in the pursuit of providing better services to caregivers. One of the ideas created in the workshops, Summer School for Caregivers, is actualized by Koç University in 2019.

  • UX Design

    Defined caregivers’ online and offline information seeking behaviours from design perspective, and identified the main features of an online platform to support their needs in regard to caring for a child on the autism spectrum. Created the information architecture for the online platform and made a working prototype. Work-in-progress.

Analysis

Making Sense of Complex Qualitative Data

Affinity diagramming: From a post-it chaos to answers—insights into many aspects of caregivers’ experiences

Deriving design implications from findings and insights

Deriving design implications from findings and insights

Design Opportunities

This research resulted in many opportunities for design. Here I present two of them:

LEFT: An article about toe walking in autism written by an expert: scary, problem-oriented, worrying, foreign.
MIDDLE: An article about toe walking in autism which is customized based on the caregiver’s input and data. Smooth, relaxing, informing just enough.
RIGHT: The same article, customized for the caregiver whose child is older and for whom toe-walking might be dangerous. Guiding, informing, action-oriented.

TOP LEFT: Searching for “echolalia” retrieves the posts that contain that term only.
BOTTOM LEFT: A caregiver is talking about echolalia but does not use the term, hence does not show up in search results. We also see that echolalia accompanies other experiences and details about the child such as diagnosis and verbal traits that might be helpful to those who seek information.
RIGHT: An ideal search result should display results that match and/or are relevant to the search query.